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Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Layers of mind

The Dhammapda opens with the lines, "All that we are is the result of what we have thought". Every thought we have is influenced by our prior notions of ourselves and the world. These prior notions themselves were created by previous thoughts. When one can see this in action in oneself, one can see that every thought leaves a residue and except the seer, all else is created by these residues. Yoga provides a neat model for these different components of the mind. The part of the mind that accumulates all these residues is the Citta. And sadly we associate ourselves only with these residues, which craves for desires to be satiated. Patanjali defines Yoga to be the state where the Citta is cleansed of all these residues!